Penny Russell reflects on what she loves about history before she takes up her new post at Harvard University…

I didn’t have to be a historian.
In my late adolescence I had a passion bordering on addiction for historical novels, especially historical romances. I read Jane Austen with an enthusiasm undimmed by endless repetitions. I developed an obsession for epistolary novels, for novels disguised as diaries (usually women’s diaries), and even for actual, historical diaries that had been published as books. All this reading lay in a realm of imaginative pleasure that to my mind seemed far away from the sterner demands of history.

The world of female domestic experience that so appealed to my imagination seemed to have no place in the history I learned at school, which dealt with wars and the rise of nations, economic fluctuations and political processes, only occasionally – in ways I found difficult to grasp – touching on something I would now call social history. So my interests, talents and loyalties lay primarily with literature.

Shock of the old

Not until I began an Arts degree at Monash in 1979 did I begin to discover that the ordinary female lives I found so absorbing could come under the purview of History.

Though ultimately transformative, the discovery crept upon me by degrees. Studying medieval English history in my first year, I was swept for a term into the lives of the Pastons, a Norfolk family caught up in the vicissitudes of English politics during the so-called Wars of the Roses. I was fascinated by the way the rhythms of their family life adapted to the disruptions of the conflict; awed by Margaret Paston’s adept, authoritative handling of crises large and small. And again and again I was jolted by the recognition that – although it appealed to me in the same way – this was not an imagined world.

Again and again the seductive illusion of familiarity, the comfortable aura of fiction, would dissolve to reveal what Tim Hitchcock has called the ‘shock of the old’ – persistent reminders of the real, never fully knowable, but significantly different, world of the past. It was my first encounter with the politics of emotion that Hitchcock associates with ‘history from below’, with its ‘demand that the reader empathise with individual men and women caught in a whirl of larger historical changes’. [i] And it still didn’t feel to me quite like ‘real’ history.

Poet of the revolution

My assumptions about the proper subject matter and methods of History were again challenged the following year, when in a course about the American War of Independence I was set an essay on the poems of Philip Freneau, called the ‘Poet of the Revolution’. Here I could exercise talents I had developed in my literary studies to probe the sentiments and meanings of Freneau’s delightfully banal verse – and at the same time could set his poems into their historical context in ways that my English tutors would have firmly discouraged.

Hitherto, I had found the ‘primary source exercises’ in my History courses dauntingly difficult, lacking the skills that could extract expansive meaning from a laundry list or a wages bill. But wallowing pleasurably in the volumes of Freneau’s verse was different. Here, I felt at home. During that year I had to choose between pursuing honours in History or English. My essay on Freneau was one of the reasons I chose History.

In my third year, I began to specialise in Australian history. Suddenly, traces of the history I was studying were all around me. And the primary sources I drew on for my essays felt real in a whole new way. That was the year I discovered the sensory pleasures of the archives: the tactile joy of opening one of those brown cardboard boxes to delve through the ordered chaos within, the shiver of excitement that comes when you untie the tape around a compact bundle of letters or ephemera, the musty tang that rises from the pages of a crumbling newspaper.

Pleasurable discoveries and unexpected successes

It was also the year that – notwithstanding my earlier enthusiasm for Margaret Paston – I discovered women’s history. When the Australian history course subdivided into specialist themes for a term, I chose the one on ‘Women’, and was thus introduced to the relatively new field of feminist historical scholarship in Australia.

Until then, I had assumed that feminism had little to do with me. Only by studying women’s history did I begin to realise just how precarious, how fortunate, was my right, as a woman, to the education I had taken for granted. And only in those tutorials did I find, at last, the confidence to speak for myself. I found, too, a history of other women for whom it had been difficult to speak in public, difficult to own the confidence or assume the authority that seemed to come so much more easily to men. Through women’s history I found a voice and a purpose.

Discovering the strenuous opposition and misogynist contempt women had encountered when they first demanded a political voice made me a feminist on their behalf, long before I was comfortable with the label on my own account. Realising just how little attention earlier historians had paid to those struggles, or to women’s experience more generally, made me a feminist scholar. I adopted with pride the badge of a ‘feminist historian’: not just a historian of feminism, but a scholar eager to correct the gendered imbalances of history. The rich, complex, largely unexplored terrain of women’s history beckoned to me irresistibly, and my personal politics were forged as I trod these new paths.

I didn’t have to be a historian. Thinking back now – and re-reading some of those formative essays of mine – I am reminded of choices once made and long forgotten, of opportunities seized or left lying, of disappointments that might have turned my path, of pleasurable discoveries and unexpected successes that confirmed it. I am reminded of inspirational, supportive, bracing and downright critical teachers, tutors and lecturers who all played a part as I gradually harnessed my interest in the particular, the personal, the domestic and feminine, and my preference for imaginative, subjective and creative forms of writing to the rigorous disciplinary demands of History – demands for evidence, structured argument, critical thinking, and a sense of the broader significance and patterns to be found in the small stories I so love. And I realise, too, that these days I reach automatically for historical interpretations, so that when asked to reflect on my love of history, I dig back into my own past to trace a story of cause and effect, of the interplay of individual purpose, social forces and historical accident.

I didn’t have to be a historian. But these days, it feels as though I always was.

Penny Russell is Bicentennial Professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney, with a particular interest in gender and colonial society. In 2016-17, she will be at Harvard University as the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Professor of Australian Studies, where she will teach courses on emotions in history and the ‘intimate frontiers’ of nineteenth-century Australian society.

Penny Russell was interviewed by Dinoo Kelleghan at the NSW Teacehers Federation: http://education.www.stagingnswtf.com.au/education15/features-1/historians-go-adventuring/

Suggested Readings:

Dever, Maryanne, Sally Newman and Ann Vickery, The Intimate Archive: Journeys Through Private Papers Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2009.

Farge, Arlette, The Allure of the Archives [transl. Thomas Scott-Railton] New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

Grimshaw, Patricia, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly Creating aNation Ringwood: McPhee Gribble, 1994.

Griffiths, Tom, ‘The intriguing dance of history and fiction’, TEXT Special Issue 28: Fictional histories and historical fictions: Writing history in the twenty-first century, (eds Camilla Nelson and Christine de Matos), April 2015. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue28/Griffiths.pdf

Hitchcock, Tim, ‘Sources, Empathy and Politics in History from Below’, in Mark Hailwood, Laura Sangha, Brodie Waddell and Jonathan Willis (eds), The Voices of the People: An Online Symposium (2015) https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/voices-of-the-people/

Russell, Penny, Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010.

Steedman, Carolyn, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

[i]Tim Hitchcock, ‘Sources, Empathy and Politics in History from Below’, in Mark Hailwood, Laura Sangha, Brodie Waddell and Jonathan Willis (eds), The Voices of the People: An Online Symposium (2015) https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/voices-of-the-people/

Kate Cameron looks at some issues, approaches and opportunities in the History 7-10 syllabus…

The NSW 7-10 History Syllabus: Getting it Right

The new NSW 7-10 History Syllabus is based on the content, skills and concepts of the Australian Curriculum: History, yet it retains familiar key features of the earlier NSW syllabus, such as the inclusion of outcomes and the organisation of content in stages. This was the result of extensive consultation with teachers by the NSW Board of Studies.

Teachers’ experience with what it is possible to teach within the 100 hours available per stage in NSW schools informed the decision to include only four depth studies in Stage 5. This allows more time in Years 9 and 10 for deeper investigation of content and the development and application of historical skills and concepts. This should help strengthen the transition to Stage 6 work.  The ‘achievement standards’ of the national curriculum are presented as ‘stage statements’ in the NSW Syllabus, so despite the different terms, teachers of history across the country are aiming for the same standards.

While these statements inform teaching and learning programs, NSW teachers report student achievement in history for the Record of School Achievement using A-E grades based on the history course performance descriptors. These descriptors have been aligned to the stage 5 statement. It is important for teachers to be aware of these key differences between the Australian Curriculum: History and the NSW 7-10 History Syllabus when accessing and using online material relating to programming and assessment.

Challenges of implementation

• Overviews

Overviews are designed to provide a context for the depth studies to be undertaken.  There are two overviews for each stage. Teachers should spend around 10% of teaching time on the overviews, i.e. 5 hours per year or 10 hours per stage. An overview can be taught separately, as an introduction to the depth studies to be taught in a semester or a year; it can be split to provide separate introductions to different depth studies; or parts of an overview can be integrated into a Depth Study.

Last year many teachers found they spent too much time on the overviews. Useful strategies for dealing with overviews include informed teacher exposition, activities based on relevant websites or audio visual material, together with a skeletal timeline that can be added to as the depth studies progress.

• Historical concepts

The key historical concepts, continuity and change, cause and effect, perspectives, empathetic understanding, significance and contestability, will be familiar to experienced teachers of history. They are the underpinning ‘big ideas’ of history; they provide a focus for historical investigation, a framework for organising historical information and a guide for developing historical understanding.

The new NSW syllabus prominently features these concepts at the beginning of each stage and provides a K-10 continuum suggesting how students might develop and demonstrate their understanding of the concepts. Teachers do not need to feature all the concepts within each Depth Study, but should choose those that are most relevant and can be integrated most appropriately into each Depth Study.  By the end of each stage, each historical concept should have been featured at least once. The Australian Curriculum History Units website, www.achistoryunits.edu.au, provides additional explanation and strategies for teaching these important key concepts.

• New content in Stage 4

This is the second year of implementation for Year 7 and most teachers have accommodated the new syllabus quite readily and are now consolidating and refining their programs and resources. The historical skills to be taught will be familiar to teachers and the six depth studies for Stage 4 present little change in content from the previous syllabus, apart from two areas that teachers may not have taught previously:                                                   

• Depth Study 1 Investigating the Ancient Past requires a study of sources relating to ancient Australia and related heritage issues. The website www.achistoryunits.edu.au has a ‘ready to go’ learning sequence that supports this study very well;

• Depth Study 3 ‘The Asian World’ requires a study of either China or India.

Depth Study 6 Expanding Contacts, elective 6d, ‘Aboriginal and Indigenous Peoples, Colonisation and Contact History’, requires a comparison of the nature and impact of colonisation in Australia and one other country. This study, mandatory under the previous syllabus, is no longer mandatory, although many teachers continue to teach it as it provides important knowledge and understanding and a solid foundation for Stage 5.

• New content and approaches in Stage 5

Depth Study 1 Making a better world? features three new elective topics from which teachers choose one:  ‘The Industrial Revolution’,  ‘Movement of peoples’ or ‘Progressive ideas and movements.’ This has required teachers to research and develop new programs and to take a more global approach than required by the previous syllabus. Each topic links the relevant global theme to aspects of Australian history.

Depth Study 2 Australia and Asia is in fact Australia or Asia. Teachers will be familiar with most of the content of the ‘Making a nation’ elective from the old syllabus, but those who choose ‘Asia and the world’, will need to develop new programs and resources for a study of the key features of one Asian society from 1750.

Two of the four depth studies are mandatory: Depth Study 3, Australians at War and Depth Study 4 Rights and Freedoms 1945 – present. Depth Study 5, The Globalising World offers three electives: ‘Popular Culture’, ‘the Environment Movement’ and ‘Migration experiences’. All studies contain some content that will be familiar from the old syllabus. However the new studies include a wider range of Australian and international issues, and once again emphasise a more global perspective. This approach is reflected in the broad nature of the syllabus outcomes.

The NSW syllabus requires only four of the six Depth Studies in Stage 5 to be undertaken and mandates only two of these.  Schools have the opportunity to develop a Depth Study of their own (Depth Study 6), based on content drawn from either of the stage 5 overviews – together with relevant outcomes, skills and concepts. Many schools are opting to update their existing units on Australia in the Vietnam War era, while others are developing a Depth Study on the Holocaust.

• Depth Study 3: Australians at War

Depth Study 3 Australians at War has been a challenge for some Year 9 teachers. The study examines aspects of the experiences of Australians in World War I and World War II.  Teachers may approach the wars as separate studies or they may be taught as a comparative study. It is not meant to be a senior level study of both wars. The changing scope and nature of warfare and the participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are new areas. However most of the content echoes the old syllabus, including commemoration and the nature of the ANZAC legend, a topic of special significance this year.

It is important to note that teachers do not need to go into great depth on every content dot point. While some invite deeper source study, others can be treated with a simple graph or mapping exercise. The syllabus does not require each content point to be given equal weight and there is flexibility in the way content can be sequenced. For example, Gallipoli could double as the ‘specific campaign’ for World War I and the evacuation from Gallipoli could be the ‘specific event/incident’. This would help ensure there is not too much overlap with the study of World War I undertaken in Stage 6. With only two Depth Studies to be completed in Year 9, there should be more time for students to develop and apply the relevant skills and concepts to their investigation of the content. This should help them attain the target syllabus outcomes.

Depth Study 4: Rights and Freedoms

The temptation with this mandatory study is to spend too much time on the USA civil rights experience at the expense of the strong history of activism by Aboriginal Australians and their supporters in their struggle for rights and freedoms. The NSW Freedom Ride, inspired by events in the USA, was an important event – but it was only one in more than a century of Aboriginal activism which needs to be acknowledged. There is a global dimension to this study which includes the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as current efforts to secure civil rights and freedoms in Australia and throughout the world. In developing programs teachers need to allocate an appropriate proportion of lessons to the Australian, US and global dimensions of the study. As with all depth studies, teachers have the flexibility in developing their programs to arrange the content in a way that suits the approach they would like to take. There is no requirement to teach the content in the order that it appears on the pages of the syllabus.
 

Professional learning opportunities

The Centre for Professional Learning and the History Teachers Association of NSW are conducting professional development days in Sydney and regional areas to familiarise teachers with the requirements of the new syllabus and to share programming, teaching and assessment strategies. Check the CPL and HTA websites for dates and venues.  Teaching History, HTA’s journal, regularly publishes articles, programs and teaching ideas for the new syllabus.

Kate Cameron has had extensive experience in public schools as a teacher and head teacher and in universities as a teacher educator. She has published a number of textbooks and journal articles on history and history teaching for primary and secondary teachers. She currently supports teachers through her work as Regional Officer for the History Teachers Association of NSW and as presenter for the Centre for Professional Learning.